Cold-Air Return Moved

I can cross number 2 from the last post off. I moved the cold-air return much lower to the floor and cut the wall to about half size. I just cut the wall shorter, but didn’t measure anything because I’m not sure how high, exactly, it should be. I’ll have to cut them down again later when I know how high the countertop will be.

More Demolition

Today I decided to take down the wall between the kitchen and dining room. Well, not take the whole wall down, but just take off all the drywall so I could see what was there. I’m going to have to cut this wall down to match the height of the kitchen cabinets. But since this wall is at the end of the slope in the floor, I’m not exactly sure where to cut it yet. That will come later. I also finished pulling all the furring strips that were close to the ceiling down, so the brick walls are bare, except for the outlets on them. I would have taken them off too, but that requires me to cut the power to the room, which means the lights won’t work. And today it has been storming quite a bit, so there isn’t much natural light to work with. I’ll see if tomorrow is better for that.

Rails4 and Assets

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get a background image to show on a production server running a new rails4 app. Everything looked fine on my laptop, but once I deployed to the server, the image wouldn’t show. I only had one image on the site, but I’m pretty sure that if I had more, none of them would have showed.

Really Done Now

It took a little over an hour, but I got the floor grouted. I will have to inspect it more closely in the morning when the light is better, but I think it looks pretty good.

Know What’s Better Than Perfect? Done!

I am really tired, but the tile is all in. Sometime this week, I’ll grout and it’ll be completely done, but that’s pretty easy. The difficult stuff was this weekend and I got it done. It’s no where near perfect. In fact, I ended up needing one more red tile. But since it was going in a place that will be under cabinets, I just stuck two smaller pieces together. And if you look closely, you’ll see a number of other mistakes, but I’m going to try to not look closely and just be happy with it.

So Close

My intention today was to finish putting down the tile in my kitchen. I got really close, but then ran out of thinset again. So I need to go to Home Depot for more and then I can finish it tomorrow. Yay!

Smarter Than I Look

I’m getting to the point in my kitchen where I’m rebuilding walls. Unfortunately, my memory of how the contractor did the rest of the house is fuzzy. So I searched through iPhoto on my laptop to see if I could find any pictures of how the walls went up. And I found a movie I made where I walked through the house to look at the electrical connections and could see how the walls were built. And even better, I said what this piece of electrical conduit that’s currently sticking in my kitchen is for. That was great because I was leaning toward cutting it out since I didn’t know why it was there. Yay me! So this morning I’m going to make another movie for myself just for future reference.

Ruby Methods

I’m still learning where methods go when writing ruby on rails applications. I read something earlier today (and had read it before) that you need to think “tell, don’t ask” when it comes to methods. So basically when working with an object, if you want it to do something, you tell it to do that. This method will then go into the model and get called with @object.method. So, in my application, after an applicant is saved. I want to send a message to the object to send email to that applicant. I had this in the controller, but now I’m pretty sure that this belongs in the model. It ends up looking like this:

Pittsburgh Trip

I just got back from a long weekend spent in Pittsburgh. I went there to attend Steel City Ruby Conf, which was pretty good. The first day had a lot of self-described “touchy-feely” talks, which I wasn’t crazy about, but understood why they were being given. Though Julie Pagano’s talk on Front-End Development was pretty good and Jim Weinrich’s “Friendly Flying Robots” was a lot of fun. The talks on Day 2 were much more what I was looking forward to. The talk on git by the Steven Ball was really informative and I’m hoping I can start using some of his tips right away. Avdi Grimm’s talk on Pair Programming has pretty much convinced me that I should give it a try as soon as I get some time. And Leon Gersing’s inspiring talk was the perfect finish. So, based on the strength of those talks, I feel it was a pretty good conference.

Kitchen Tile

I took a few days this week and got to work on the tile floor in the kitchen. I had hoped to get more of it finished, but ran out of thin set mortar and energy. Thankfully, Julie came over to visit and Paul brought us both lunch, so I had a lovely lunch with them. Not sure if I’ll be able to finish it tomorrow, so I this may be on hold for a week or so. Going to try to just be satisfied with what I got done today.

Family Trip to Michigan

Finally got around to posting all the pictures I took on our trip to Michigan. They’re here.

Fixing Inflections for Acronyms

In my app, there are a list of files that people need to upload. I had set things up so that they could pick the type of file from a dropdown list. The list of files are:

First Cabinet

It probably says something about me (that I wouldn’t like) that a thoroughly enjoyable evening to me is to have a baseball game on while assembling a cabinet in my pajamas. I bought two cabinets yesterday and put together my first one today.

Rebuilding Begins!

I made my first repairs today.

Rails Basics

These are just some notes on doing everything in rails by hand.

Rails Controllers

I’m starting a new rails app, using Rails4, and am trying to do more things by hand instead of depending on generators. I actually think generators are great, but I want to better understand how all the parts fit together. So I want to know how to do things by hand, instead of depending on the generators.

Gutted!

That’s basically it for gutting the kitchen.

Me and Mari

Partial Success

I got a lot done today. But pulling up floor boards is hard on my back. And by around lunchtime, I knew I was done for the day. I got most of the room done and generated a large amount of garbage, which is basically how I measure how much I worked.

Looking on the Bright Side

My sister has returned to town, so I had to return her car, making me carless for the time-being. I have finally decided on a car and was supposed to go and pick it up today. But, because I’m a moron, I forgot to call my insurance company to pay for insurance on my brand-new car. So, I decided to postpone picking up the car until Monday.

Lots to Do

Since I was feeling depressed after realizing how much there still is to do on the kitchen, I thought I should take a minute to see how far I’ve come. Below are some pictures I took on the final walkthru of the house when I bought it in 2005 and how it looks now. Eight years of my life. Not sure it was worth it.

Walls Down

I finally finished taking down the walls in the kitchen, though I think I still have to pull off those furring strips. However, I have generated a ton of garbage, so I’ll hold off on that for now. I also have to make the wall between the kitchen and dining room into a half wall, but that can come later. I think the next step will be to rip out the floor down to the subfloor. After that, I’m not sure. I may have to consult with Mick.

Crazy

Mickey the Great came over today and we moved the gas line in my kitchen. As an added bonus, we put in some shutoff valves which I was missing. And lastly, we fully disconnected the dishwasher. We also hauled it out to the alley and two hours later, it’s already gone. Now I’ll be able to put out my beautiful old stove (that has a hole in the side) as well.

It’s Over

There will be no more cooking or cleaning at my house for the foreseeable future. I just finished removing the sink. It’s somewhat depressing thinking about how much more work I have to do.

Pathetic

Yesterday was the annual Run for Hope that I’ve been doing the past few years. This year, as usual, I was racing my now 13-year old nephew Jack. He beat me last year by seven minutes and my goal was to get that down to five this year.